UEFA Champions League

UEFA Champions League, annual men’s association football (soccer) tournament managed by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), featuring the national champions and other top clubs from individual football leagues across European countries. Initially known as the European Cup in 1955, it was rebranded as the UEFA Champions League (UCL) from 1992 onward. Spanish football club Real Madrid, with 15 titles, is the most successful club in the tournament’s history. The equivalent European women’s association football competition was first held in the 2001–02 season as the UEFA Women’s Cup. Starting with the 2009–10 edition, it was renamed the UEFA Women’s Champions League.

Formation and history

Several multinational tournaments had been arranged for European clubs before the Champions League was organized. The Challenge Cup was played by teams from the former Habsburg Empire from 1897 to 1911. The Mitropa Cup was set up in 1927 and featured clubs from Central European countries such as Austria, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic and Slovakia), Hungary, Italy, Romania, Switzerland, and Yugoslavia (now Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, North Macedonia, Slovenia, Serbia, and Montenegro). This tournament was abandoned during World War II. In 1930 the Swiss club Servette FC hosted an event called the Coupe de Nations, primarily in response to the first World Cup that year in Uruguay, which had seen poor European participation.

In the 1950s French sports journalist Jacques Ferran and Gabriel Hanot, an editor at the newspaper L’Equipe, lobbied for a pan-European football tournament. After an English newspaper hailed the Wolverhampton Wanderers’ win over Hungarian club Honvéd FC in December 1954 by calling the former “champions of the world,” Hanot convinced the newly formed UEFA to hold a European club competition.

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Game of Trophies

A rule dating back to 1968–69 awarded the cup permanently to any team that won the competition five times in total or three times in a row, with UEFA commissioning an identical replacement for future competitions. UEFA General Secretary Hans Bangerter enlisted Swiss jeweller Jürg Stadelmann to design a new trophy after Spanish football club Real Madrid became the first team to be awarded the cup permanently in 1967. The football clubs Real Madrid, Ajax, Bayern Munich, AC Milan, and Liverpool all have trophies permanently in their possession, with a new version, identical in design to Stadelmann’s, commissioned each time the cup was handed over. Ahead of the 2008–09 season, UEFA changed the rules to ensure that it retained possession of the permanent trophy following the awards ceremony after each season’s final, with the winning club getting an identical replica to take home.

The first edition of the continental tournament, named the European Champion Clubs’ Cup, kicked off in 1955 with 16 clubs, comprising some national league champions and other teams included by invitation. English champions Chelsea did not compete after the country’s Football Association refused to authorize its participation. Real Madrid won the inaugural tournament; the club went on to win the next four editions before Portuguese club Benfica won in the 1960–61 season. The 1956–57 season saw an expansion to 22 teams, and then to 24 teams after another year. The 1966–67 tournament was played by 33 teams, consisting of the winners of 32 European national leagues and the 1965–66 champion Real Madrid. From 1967–68 the main competition featured 32 participating teams.

UEFA reorganized and renamed the tournament the UEFA Champions League in 1992, and switched the first round format from a direct knockout system to a round-robin group stage. A league anthem, composed by English composer Tony Britten, was commissioned the same year, with lyrics in UEFA’s three official languages of German, French, and English.

Format and qualification

The European Cup format involved qualified teams playing each other home and away in a series of knockout rounds. When the Champions League was set up in 1992, a series of qualifiers were used to pick the top eight teams who played in two groups of four, followed by a final between the winners of each group. In 1994 the main tournament expanded to 16 teams, who then played in four groups of four, followed by three knockout rounds (quarterfinals, semifinals, and final) featuring the winners and runners-up of the groups. Further expansions, to 24 teams in 1997 and then 32 teams in 1999–2000, followed. The 32 teams played in eight groups of four—the 16 teams that qualified from this stage then played a second group stage followed by knockouts. From the 2003–04 season onward, the second group stage was replaced with an additional knockout round.

UEFA modified the format again from the 2024–25 season onward, expanding the number of teams in the main tournament to 36. The qualification system was changed to select the 36 clubs for the league stage based on a ranking coefficient system, in which the 55 countries that form part of UEFA were ranked ahead of each season according to the performance of participating clubs over the previous five years.

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The final participants are divided into four pots of nine each based on the coefficient ranking system. In the league phase each team plays against eight others—two teams drawn from each of the four pots—for a total of eight games, four at home, and four away. The clubs are awarded three points for a win, one for a draw, and zero for a loss. The top eight ranked teams (based on points) qualify directly for the knockouts, and the next sixteen teams participate in an extra playoff round, with the winners earning the remaining eight knockout spots.

The list of 36 qualifiers for the tournament is based on the table below.

Successful clubs, players, and managers

A total of 24 clubs have won the competition at least once. Real Madrid is the most successful team in the league’s history, with 15 titles. AC Milan (7 titles), Bayern Munich (6 titles), Liverpool FC (6 titles), and FC Barcelona (5 titles) are the other clubs with 5 or more championships. Real Madrid has also featured in the tournament the highest number of times, appearing in 44 seasons, followed by Benfica (42) and the Dutch club Ajax (36).

Five players have been part of a winning team six times; not surprisingly, all of them have been primarily associated with Real Madrid. Francisco (“Paco”) Gento was the first to six titles when Real Madrid won the European Cup five times in a row from 1956 to 1960; he added a sixth title in 1966. Footballers Luka Modrić, Dani Carvajal, and Nacho Fernández have also won all their six titles with Real Madrid. German football player Toni Kroos has won five titles with Real Madrid, alongside one with Bayern Munich.

The most successful club manager in the league’s history is Carlo Ancelotti, who previously won the league twice as a player for AC Milan. Ancelotti led his former team to the title twice, along with three title wins managing Real Madrid, for a total of five titles as coach.

Legendary footballers Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi lead the list of top goal scorers in the tournament’s history, with 141 and 129 goals, respectively. Polish forward Robert Lewandowski is the only other player with more than 100 goals in the UEFA Champions League. Cristiano Ronaldo has the most appearances (187) in the league’s history.

2025–26 UCL

The 2025–26 UEFA Champions League season was the 71st season of the competition, and the 34th under its current name. The tournament final, played on May 30, 2026, at the Puskás Aréna in Budapest, saw French football club and defending champion Paris Saint-Germain FC defeat English team Arsenal 1–1 (4–3) after a penalty shoot-out. The 2025–26 season marked the first time the tournament featured six teams from one country, with five teams from the English Premier League (EPL) earning qualification for the season through the selection criteria and the EPL club Tottenham Hotspur FC advancing as the winner of the 2024–25 UEFA Europa League.

List of winners

A list of the men’s UEFA Champions League (formerly European Cup) and UEFA Women’s Champions League (formerly UEFA Women’s Cup) winners is provided in the tables.